15th Annual Workshop for Educators Plumbs DevOps and Technical Debt

August 27, 2018 • Article

August 27, 2018—Software engineering educators gathered recently at the SEI’s Pittsburgh headquarters for the 15th Software Engineering Workshop for Educators. The SEI hosts this annual event to foster an ongoing exchange of ideas among educators whose curricula include software engineering. The SEI’s Grace Lewis and Robert Nord led the workshop, which was attended by 27 educators representing institutions located in Canada, Colombia, Jamaica, Mexico, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The first day of the workshop, Hasan Yasar delivered the course DevOps in Practice. Day two began with the course Managing Technical Debt of Software, which was taught by Nord. The balance of the workshop comprised group sessions facilitated by SEI staff. These sessions offered participants an opportunity to exchange experiences, ideas, and artifacts they’ve used to successfully introduce software engineering topics into college curricula.

“The third day of the workshop is always the most interesting for me,” said Lewis. “The artifacts that educators come up with to teach software engineering concepts are amazing. They leave the workshop with many clever ideas that they incorporate into their own courses.”

Shawn Bohner, professor and director of software engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute concurred. “This is a great conduit for collaboration among software engineering educators and technologists,” he said.

The courses, too, were well received by workshop participants. “[The] DevOps practical demos were useful and rich with hands-on information,” said Rami Bahsoon, senior lecturer in software engineering at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. “They provided clarification on how the methodology can be applied in practice.”

“The whole idea of technical debt as a way to explore maintainability and extensibility is very rich,” noted Steve Chenoweth, associate professor of computer science and software engineering, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana. “The course gave us ways to consider these quality attributes and techniques to manage them.”

By conducting these annual workshops, the SEI is helping educators in the field of software engineering improve their pedagogy and, consequently, improve the understanding of software engineering concepts among the hundreds of students they instruct. This understanding will help future software engineering professionals as they enter a technological environment of ever-increasing scale and complexity.